The official apology by the parliament and cabinet of Australia fits into global trends of gradual rehabilitation of indigenous peoples and appears to be a natural continuation of the policy of the authorities of the Green Continent. In the last decade, the Australian government has taken a number of steps aimed at expanding the social and economic rights of Aborigines, who as a whole belong to the least well-off segments of the population. Even the life expectancy of indigenous Australians is significantly shorter than the national average. In 1998, a national Day of Regret was established to remind of the harsh policy of extermination and assimilation that led to the marginalization of surviving tribes. However, the conservatives at the helm refused to be consistent to the end - former Prime Minister John Howard repeatedly stated that his cabinet could not be held responsible for the policies of predecessors. Conservative ministers even ignored personal appeals from the heads of the Roman Catholic Church. First John Paul II and then the current pontiff Benedict XVI called on the Australian government to apologize for the unfair treatment of them in the past.
The Labor Party, which secured a majority of votes in the elections last November, promised not to delay the apology. The new government seems confident that such an act by the authorities will not subsequently provoke mass lawsuits from Aborigines and mixed-race people with financial demands. According to Jenny Macklin, the administrations of all Australian states have already offered their apologies, but this did not entail compensation costs. At the same time, the federal government does not intend to create a national fund for compensation payments to Aborigines, leaving the right to decide financial issues to the state authorities. According to an AFP report, just last week in Tasmania, the administration approved the allocation of several million dollars for possible payments to those Aborigines who identify themselves as the so-called 'Stolen Generation'.
Indeed, this group of Aborigines, who were essentially removed from their natural environment and handed over for upbringing to white families and special shelters, is the most active part of Australia's indigenous population, currently numbering about 470,000 people. The program of forced assimilation, which the authorities of the Green Continent practiced until the 1970s, is considered a crime by representatives of the 'Stolen Generation', and the social experiment itself a complete failure. Aboriginal rights activists maintain that as a result of the violent rupture of cultural and family ties, they cannot feel at one either with their own people or with the descendants of the colonists.